A Very Simple Mistake
In my last post I talked about being discouraged that although I have technically been developing games for over twenty years I’ve never actually released a single title and how despite my skills and experience increasing over the years, I’ve found it more and more difficult to get even close to feeling like something I’ve built would be release worthy.
Every indie game developer has their own graveyard of failed and forgotten concepts, but there’s usually a number of releases scattered around as well. They may not consider these releases “successful”, but each one provides a wealth of information on what worked, what didn’t, what could be changed, and makes getting to the next release a little easier.
One of the first mistakes most new game developers make is making their scope too ambitious. The halls of Discord and r/gamedev are littered with the posts of newcomers who want to make their own Skyrim or Breath of the Wild armed with a cornucopia of ideas and aspirations but not a sliver of prior experience. Don’t start with your most exciting idea. Aspire to that by all means, but just like you’re setting yourself up for failure by fighting the final boss with no power-ups, no extra health containers, and only the starting pistol, so too are you doing so here.
After watching HeartBeast’s video and puzzling on it for a few days, I realized that my issue was a variation of this very simple problem. Coming from an enterprise software development background, I knew that the key to solving complex tasks is the ability to break those tasks into smaller, more manageable chunks that can be quickly and easily completed. My mistake was thinking that doing that was equivalent to reducing scope.
I generally try to manage my scope very carefully to make sure I’m not targeting something too big. However, my process for doing so was flawed. Rather than design content, I would design systems that I could plug into to generate more content. Picture a game with themed dungeons. If I build a dungeon generator, then creating a new dungeon is as simple as providing new theme graphics. Thus I can build one dungeon as part of my initial scope, and then just expand on it post-release.
But I realized recently that designing systems and breaking down their complexity into tasks is not the same as reducing scope overall. Sure, it means I don’t have to design 32 different dungeons, but it’s still a ton of work. If we suggest that scope is the combined total of quantity and complexity, my old process was just trading quantity for complexity while the overall total stayed the same.
I also realized that a game doesn’t have to be a certain length to be considered successful. I’ve recently been watching videos covering various games developed as part of game jams, and many of these games only provide minutes of gameplay, but are still able to provide wonderful experiences that players enjoy and remember. A game doesn’t need to be ten, forty, or one hundred hours long to be a success. It’s about the quality of the experience and how much it conveys the experience the developer intended, not the duration of that experience.
Gone Home is a great example of this. It is widely regarded as a successful indie game1There can be some debate about whether it is a “game” in the traditional sense, but that’s irrelevant for the point I’m making here., but it is also often estimated at only having one to two hours worth of gameplay. It’s also not one that most players will return to over and over again. Duration and replay value do not determine quality.
With these two points in mind, I started a new project with an intentionally limited scope. In only a single week, I’ve found that I made more progress on this project and am happier with that progress than on any other project I can remember. Along with having a new strategy for time management2This is something I’ve always had a very hard time with and that I’ll be writing a post about in the future., I’m very excited about this one and am very optimistic that I’ll be able to take it all the way to release! In my next post, I’ll reveal the changes I made to my process and what this new project is that was born from it!
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